The Beast

Dolls are made with neutral expressions to please everyone. Humans, with the help of Artificial Intelligence, may yet take after dolls.

In the future dominated by Artificial Intelligence, Gabrielle is encouraged to purge her character of negative emotions. She can do this by revisiting past lives in France (1904) and Los Angeles (2014), where she exhibited intense reactions. She is warned that at any time she will encounter a beast that intends to do her harm.

As Gabrielle navigates the past she encounters Louis in both places. Gabrielle is simultaneously fearful of Louis and in love with him. He has similar feelings about her. To trust one another Gabrielle and Louis need to bridge generations, cultures, and the depths of their own hearts. Either that or become human dolls.

The Beast is cerebral, intense, complex, and mystifying. While the film is abnormally long, there are scenes that quicken the pulse and make it seem like no time passes at all. The nonlinear plot construction and deep conversations of The Beast make it into a intricate puzzle that I am still trying to figure out. I'd like the film more if it didn't paint American males with such a broad and negative brush (but perhaps I don't like this aspect because it is so uncomfortably true). The film is growing in my appreciation, perhaps as I accept this truth. The Beast is loosely based on The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James and the character of a real person. I love the thought of revisiting past lives and exploring the question about whether intense emotions do more harm than good.

Director Bertrand Bonello's "The Beast" is not for the faint of heart. It's daring, divergent, disorienting, occasionally bombastic and frustrating - in short, very French. Voila, mes amis!

The film is based, loosely, on Henry James' 1903 novella "The Beast in the Jungle." In this eighty-page short story, James suggests that the beast represents our own fear. James believed that personal fear causes an overwhelming sense of dread about the future accompanied by a sense of impending personal catastrophe, sensations that annihilate the possibility of fulfilling love with another.

In the opening scene, Gabriella (Léa Seydoux) is standing in front of a green screen receiving instructions from Bonello. It's the first clue that this film will be unconventional and surprising. Fair warning.

The film takes place at three different times. The story begins in Paris in 1910. Louis (a tremendous George MacKay - "1917") is in the process of wooing Gabrielle away from her attentive but uninteresting husband. There are also scenes in 2014 in Los Angeles. Gabrielle is a housesitting struggling actor/model. Lou is an incel psychopath who stalks her while spouting ominously about seeking "retribution." Finally, again in Paris, action takes place in 2044. In this dystopian future, AI has taken over the world, people must wear airtight masks to go outside and humans are strongly encouraged to engage in "purification," a process of purging DNA of past traumas and permanently deadening emotions. Bonello flashes forward and backward regularly. If you're feeling overwhelmed right now, it's probably because you're accurately processing how this story unfolds. To further complicate matters, Bonello shifts tone and content throughout the film - from period piece (1910) to thriller/horror film (2014) to dystopian sci-fi film (2044).

Bonello uses these three palettes, each shot in a distinctive cinematic style, to throw out some really weighty issues: that our sense of dread may be an accurate foreshadowing of the collapse of civilization, that deadening ourselves emotionally may be the most adaptive way to cope with the atrocities that occur around us continuously. For good measure, he plays with the juxtaposition of loneliness and love and scrutinizes the role of fate. If you crave a straightforward narrative or have low tolerance for ambiguity, now is a good time to run away screaming.

For you brave souls who accept the challenge, you'll be rewarded with a mesmerizing performance by Léa Seydoux, a close-up of hand-holding that's more sensual than most sex scenes plus images and ideas that will haunt you for days after the experience.

Beautiful costumes and stunning sets, amazing performance of the two main characters. An original and engaging screenplay that resonates with contemporary matters. A movie that raises intriguing questions about the evolution of technology and its role in modern society. Bonello appropriately explores the importance of emotions and affects : are they desirable or to be avoided at all costs ? This movie offers a captivating and enjoyable travel through time and ages, deserving to be appreciated at its right value. The only criticism I would offer is that I found it a bit lengthy towards the end, and, at times, it was difficult to follow and understand.

Though it's really way too long, I did rather enjoy the developing chemistry here between Léa Seydoux ("Gabrielle") and George MacKay's "Louis". The story isn't really structured, it's all largely dictated from her consciousness lounging in the bath of Guinness no longer needed by "Baron Harkkonen" where she is having her DNA cleansed. This is ostensibly to make her life happier and more fulfilled, to take the rough edges off disappointment and pain - and generally to turn her into a rather soporific drone. The thing is, whilst plugged in and gently soaking we discover that her brain isn't co-operating with the process and that she is having very lifelike fantasies - historical, contemporary and futuristic with the handsome and enigmatic "Louis". The story in itself isn't really up to very much. It's an episodic jaunt through what is/was/might be their lives - together and apart. What does work well is the ambiguity. The sense that artificial intelligence, either working on it's own or at the behest of humanity, can rearrange our thoughts and our memories. It can create as convincingly as it can delete comprehensively - and all because there is a sense that emotions are unpredictable, unreliable and therefore a threat to the stability of a new "natural order". The dialogue can meander into the realms of psycho-babble now and again which does detract from the subtle but clear thrust of the narrative, but it is actually quite a scary prognosis of what might become fact if we are not careful to protect what is real and important.

When David Ehrlich reviewed The Beast (org. French title La Bête), he made the case -- that the movie makes the case -- that we ought to demand every major arthouse director make "their own Cloud Atlas" before joining the choir invisible. That is a fair way to view Bertrand Bonello's recent opus - a languid sci-fi drama that, as far as I'm concerned, solidified the movie year of 2024 as worthy of '23. When seeking out strange and defiant new cinema, this is exactly the kind of mystifying journey on which I yearn to be taken.

In the film, we follow Lea Seydoux through what appears to be different time periods. In several of them, the construction of dolls is involved. In the past and present storylines, she encounters a man played by George MacKay; in the future, she seems to dream of all these moments while submerged in a dark substance. Are they real events on any level? Hey, don't look at me.

It is the sort of film that might easily turn some people off and seem inaccessible as I describe it. (Others have likened its atmosphere and dream logic to the works of Lynch and its unsettling view of love and sexuality to the works of Cronenberg.) But I assure you that the film as such is often quite funny, with MacKay portraying one of the most wince-inducingly accurate parodies of the Incel archetype we've ever seen on film -- his pathetic "I deserve girls" vlog is one of the highlights of the picture, although its similarities with the infamous Elliot Rodger rant will doubtless disturb some viewers.

If that's not doing it for you (understandable), the film also offers beautiful shot compositions, masterly lighting, and wicked satire of modern movie-making itself, chiefly the digitalization of it.

Also, I guess in one of the time periods or "realities" or whatever, Seydoux's character is an actress whose credits seem to include Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers. As it happens, we'll be talking more about Korine later -- along with a markedly less intelligent contemplation on modern/future cinema.